Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes - page 8

Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
[In] economics... you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It is now the scientific consensus that our risk-avoidance mechanism is not mediated by the cognitive modules of our brain, but rather by the emotional ones. This may have made us fit for the Pleistocene era. Our risk machinery is designed to run away from tigers; it is not designed for the information-laden modern world. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We are robust when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes -fragile otherwise. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What kills me makes others stronger. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Difficulty is what wakes up the genius. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated-the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb